Natalia Winkelman

This is a filmmaker able to wrest real feeling from his actors, and from his audience.

While an early, silly death . . . suggests an exuberant self-awareness a la Quentin Tarantino, other scenes, like those that position Edie and John as star-crossed lovers, indicate that this movie’s melodrama takes itself deadly seriously. But it’s hard for the audience to do so in a story that asks us to not merely suspend disbelief, but slaughter it.

Narrative beats aren’t what make East of Wall worth watching. That would be the people — particularly Porshia and her jubilant pals, whose skills in the saddle leave a lasting impression.

Here is a movie notably unafraid to manifest the weirdest of the weird, no matter what the Mr. Moolahs of the world have to say.

Boris Lojkine’s Souleymane’s Story, an affecting film about struggle set over two days in Paris, is the rare character study that does not only build empathy with its hero’s pain but channels its sensation.

If the dearth of character development is a gag, Diciannove doesn’t offer much of a punchline. But Tortorici’s filmmaking is stylish enough to make even the slipperiest sequences pop.

No Sleep Till is an understated — and somewhat sleepy — film. Its mood of boredom tinged with dread sometimes verges on outright listlessness.

Because she lacks a conception of colonialism, Davidtz sometimes struggles to negotiate the film’s fidelity to her point of view with a more complete picture of the war.

The director, Luis Ortega, doesn’t give much reason to care about Remo’s conflict — the protagonist’s catatonia inspires the same in the viewer — and instead exhausts his efforts on a mannered blankness of style and mood.

It is the exquisitely relatable messiness of this exceptional family tale that lingers.

Kaur acts as an amiable anchor, gamely embodying a mother and a daughter across time periods.

Directed by Mark Monroe, the film wisely does not linger in the lurid details of the Titan’s catastrophic end, and instead uses an investigative framing that sketches the company’s origins and use of carbon fiber while chronicling a series of problematic dives leading up to its final plunge.

This is, after all, a situational comedy, in which the laughs spring from reaction shots and line deliveries. Luckily, the actors prove up to the task.

In his first feature, Kandhari makes use of morbid humor and expressive imagery, including stop-motion effects. He rarely relies on dialogue and favors a fuzzier plot, which leaves the story with a shapeless and sometimes confusing midsection.

Fortunately, Summer of 69 is a two-hander, and Fineman brings comic chops and genuine feeling to playing the tutor with a heart of gold.

A work of image and mood, Bonjour Tristesse captures the mythopoetic wonder of an adolescent summer, and the effect is trancelike.

Ingeniously simmering under the folly is a health crisis that has afflicted the agricultural area for decades. This is the film’s joke: If the crew could only get their heads out of their rears, they would uncover a gonzo documentary gold mine.

Beauty is pleasurable, but the film’s use of evocative visuals to focus on storytelling more broadly is what makes it a quiet knockout.

Any genuine feeling emanates from Lily. Ferreira pitches herself into the trite story line with enthusiasm, and her verve breathes life into even the most leaden lines.

The film’s biggest letdown lies in its cursory tour of who Hutchins was apart from her final hours. Despite testimony from Hutchins’s friends that repeatedly references her artistry, Mason rarely incorporates clips of Hutchins’s cinematography outside “Rust.”

It’s a middling entry into the biographical sports movie genre, and the director, Ash Avildsen, cannot resist pummeling his audience with a simplistic girl-power message.

Acting as the film’s teetering anchor, Seyfried channels a fascinating blend of composure and chaos that, in a less muddled movie, would have sung. Yet here, her portrayal of an assured woman unraveling under pressure merely lends a haunting note to a tale that strikes as simultaneously laborious and opaque.

A Sloth Story suffers from a plasticky visual design. The characters seem stiff, like action figures, and their food items, meant to look appetizing, are often rendered as colored medallions.

Beyond the stale plot and groaners that make up the dialogue, “Old Guy” suffers from haphazard pacing, as if every third scene was cut out in postproduction. Watching, one wonders who this movie is for — even within the target demographic stated in the title.

It’s a somewhat rote exercise in soul-searching, and the script lacks subtlety. (At one point, a character actually says, “you have found yourself.”) But the experience is still a worthy one for our furry leading man.

Most egregiously, the world of Kinda Pregnant is filled with dopey men and despairing women whose torments, parental or otherwise, make for a land mine of comedy duds.

If Lurker eventually succumbs to certain genre tropes and a handful of story bumps, it makes up for its limitations in perspicacity and the overall strength of its filmmaking.

All the promise of this premise is squandered in Lin’s adaptation, which in style and structure hews to hackneyed convention at every turn.